Back in 2013, I was called in to have a manual penalty lifted. I spent a year disavowing thousands of spammy backlinks.

I also took the opportunity to clean up the site – deleting doorway pages, switching to SSL and HHTP2, reorganizing the categorization, optimizing the images, adding some funky Schema, and a few other nice tricks.

After three months, the penalty was lifted, and six months later we were seeing 10 percent+ traffic increases every month.

One day I noticed the Google +1 count had shot up from 20 to 1,020.

Turns out, the boss had become frustrated with the “slow” progress and bought them from what he called a “reputable” online service.

It seemed like just another ordinary day in the office – how was I to know that a client was about to tell me something that would send a terrible chill down my spine?

One morning I was checking the crawl error report in Google Search Console for a new ecommerce client.

There had been a huge spike in crawl errors, from less than a hundred or so to thousands.

I started checking through the website itself. Category page after category page was either completely empty or had just one or two products left on it, when the last time I checked the previous day they were full.

I then checked the back-end in the CMS and saw, to my horror, that over two-thirds of all of the products had been disabled even though there was still stock left, meaning all of these product pages we’d been working hard to improve were now serving 404s.

I set up a call with the client as soon as I could to find out what had happened.

They told me that “The SEO consultant we worked with before told us it was fine to disable products whenever we want. So at the end of each season, we disable all of the products and if they’re seasonal we just launch them again with new URLs when we want to showcase them on the website again. That’s still OK, right?”

Needless to say, some training on stock management was scheduled immediately. However, the thought of all that wasted link equity over the years still haunts me to this day.

So this is so simple but it was costing our client so much money (tens of millions of dollars per month), and all it was was a misplaced canonical tag…

This client had an internal page, right off the root directory, that was built to target a keyword with an exact match MSV of ~130,000, but there was a canonical to the site’s homepage.

After a simple site crawl, once it was identified, we simply removed the tag and the page popped to Position 5 (and now generates literally tens of millions of dollars in online revenue each and every month).

I once inherited a client website that got hacked because it was using some outdated plugins.

Turns out, the links implanted on the site ended up ranking it for all sorts of “adult” keywords.

So the client was getting traffic from some pretty unsavory verticals.

It was a major brand, and we were getting press inquiries about why they were showing up for such distasteful search terms.

I was like, we’re handling it, but why were you searching for those things in the first place?

It took weeks to correct, but we installed malware protection, removed the bad links (most of them were in the forms of anchored blog comments), removed the outdated plugins, and switched to a more secure, https certificate.

They were immovable in their #1 rankings for many, many years. (I’d really love to tell you who it was, but I cannot – still, it’s all terrifyingly true!)

They decided to buy their #2 competitor in a very expensive buy-out (who was also immovable in their respective rankings). It was a huge story that month in the trades.

This competitor had an exact match keyword as their domain. (The EMD update hadn’t happened yet.) The keyword had more than a million searches per month. It was a phenomenal opportunity.

We were asked for our opinion on an SEO approach.

We said, “They are mighty, and you are mighty. We recommend you run the site and keep it as close to its current state, even if you change the fulfillment to your own infrastructure. After all, you’ll be owning your #1 and #2 spot – that’s a huge advantage against Amazon. Own that ‘above the fold’ real estate.”

The advice was not taken.

Instead, the site was purchased and promptly dismantled until Google eventually found very little importance in the domain. It dropped right out of the top spot it had enjoyed for 10+ years.

When the purchasers came back and asked how they can fix their mistake, we told them their best bet was to restore to the original state. But that was now impossible. The whole process had been fumbled.

To this day, that domain is sitting with no site attached to it. It’s just sitting in a very large company’s portfolio. It’s a domain that has so much power, and it’s just being squandered. Now that is terrifying.

Working with a large, international travel brand they were facing issues not being on HTTPS, but due to their legacy infrastructure, they had a limit of the number of redirects they could implement on any given site.

The first solution provided by development was to have the different country managers implement 10,000 redirects manually through the CMS – the country managers rejected this as it’s insane.

So the second option was they found another “SEO agency”, who agreed with (the development team) them that redirects weren’t necessary for a protocol migration and you could just change the preferred URL in Google Search Console.

The end result, both protocol versions open, both indexed, and because the majority of the international sites were English for other regions (with no hreflang so it was duplicate content), this was a straw that broke the camel’s back.

What are some of YOUR most horrific SEO tales? Scare us all in the comments, below.

Until next time, pleasant screams!

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Featured Image: Created by author, October 2018

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